By Ashley Belanger
OpenAI is hoping that Donald Trump’s AI Action Plan, due out this July, will settle copyright debates by declaring AI training fair use—paving the way for AI companies’ unfettered access to training data that OpenAI claims is critical to defeat China in the AI race.
Currently, courts are mulling whether AI training is fair use, as rights holders say that AI models trained on creative works threaten to replace them in markets and water down humanity’s creative output overall.
OpenAI is just one AI company fighting with rights holders in several dozen lawsuits, arguing that AI transforms copyrighted works it trains on and alleging that AI outputs aren’t substitutes for original works.
So far, one landmark ruling favored rights holders, with a judge declaring AI training is not fair use, as AI outputs clearly threatened to replace Thomson-Reuters’ legal research firm Westlaw in the market, Wired reported. But OpenAI now appears to be looking to Trump to avoid a similar outcome in its lawsuits, including a major suit brought by The New York Times.
“OpenAI’s models are trained to not replicate works for consumption by the public. Instead, they learn from the works and extract patterns, linguistic structures, and contextual insights,” OpenAI claimed. “This means our AI model training aligns with the core objectives of copyright and the fair use doctrine, using existing works to create something wholly new and different without eroding the commercial value of those existing works.”
Providing “freedom-focused” recommendations on Trump’s plan during a public comment period ending Saturday, OpenAI suggested Thursday that the US should end these court fights by shifting its copyright strategy to promote the AI industry’s “freedom to learn.” Otherwise, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) will likely continue accessing copyrighted data that US companies cannot access, supposedly giving China a leg up “while gaining little in the way of protections for the original IP creators,” OpenAI argued.
“The federal government can both secure Americans’ freedom to learn from AI and avoid forfeiting our AI lead to the PRC by preserving American AI models’ ability to learn from copyrighted material,” OpenAI said.
In their policy recommendations, OpenAI made it clear that it thinks funneling as much data as possible to AI companies—regardless of rights holders’ concerns—is the only path to global AI leadership.
“If the PRC’s developers have unfettered access to data and American companies are left without fair use access, the race for AI is effectively over,” OpenAI claimed. “America loses, as does the success of democratic AI. Ultimately, access to more data from the widest possible range of sources will ensure more access to more powerful innovations that deliver even more knowledge.”
OpenAI asks Trump for more legal protections
Currently, US-based AI companies are strained, OpenAI suggested, as hundreds of state laws attempt to regulate the entire AI industry. One legislative tracker from MultiState flagged 832 laws introduced in 2025 alone.
Some of these laws, OpenAI warned, are modeled after strict European Union laws that OpenAI claimed the federal government should reject replicating due to alleged limits on innovation. Altogether, the patchwork of laws “could impose burdensome compliance requirements that may hinder our economic competitiveness and undermine our national security” since they will likely be harder to enforce against Chinese companies, OpenAI said.
If Chinese models become more advanced and more widely used by Americans, China could manipulate the models or ignore harms to American users from “illicit and harmful activities such as identity fraud and intellectual property theft,” OpenAI alleged. (OpenAI has accused DeepSeek of improperly using OpenAI’s data for training.)
To prevent the threatened setbacks to US innovation and risks to national security, OpenAI urged Trump to enact a federal law that preempts state laws attempting to regulate AI threats to things like consumer privacy or election integrity, like deepfakes or facial recognition. That federal law, OpenAI suggested, should set up a “voluntary partnership between the federal government and the private sector,” where AI companies trade industry knowledge and model access for federal “relief” and “liability protections” from state laws.
Additionally, OpenAI wants protections from international laws that it claims risk slowing down America’s AI development.
The US should be “shaping international policy discussions around copyright and AI and working to prevent less innovative countries from imposing their legal regimes on American AI firms and slowing our rate of progress,” OpenAI said.
OpenAI suggested that this effort should also include the US government “actively assessing the overall level of data available to American AI firms and determining whether other countries are restricting American companies’ access to data and other critical inputs.”
According to OpenAI, the Trump administration must urgently adopt these recommendations and others regarding rapidly adopting AI in government and methodically building out AI infrastructure, as China’s open-sourced advanced AI model DeepSeek “shows that our lead is not wide and is narrowing.”
“The rapid advances seen with the PRC’s DeepSeek, among other recent developments, show that America’s lead on frontier AI is far from guaranteed,” OpenAI said.
